Nevill Johnson: Paint the smell of grass - Eoin O'Brien

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The Nurses (detail) 116 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass A PERSONAL MEMOIR EOIN O’BRIEN NEVILL JOHNSON was an enigmatic artist within whom three artistic personas struggled for expression. First, and dominant, was the painter in Johnson; then closely related but distinct, there was Johnson the photographer; and finally, Johnson the writer had to be content to let visual portrayal take precedence over literary expression. Serendipity cast him in four locations on the islands of Britain and Ireland and we have allowed Johnson’s peregrinations to determine the structure of this work. First, there was Buxton in the north of England, and the Isle of Man, where boyhood, family and schooling set down persuasive influences that would endure. “Beneath the drawers, beneath the soft epidermal boundary of abdominal skin, not yet identified, named or recorded, lay a pulsing blastoderm. And there came to term in July 1911, under the sign of Leo, in one of the hottest summers on record, a blue-eyed web-toed left-handed boychild.” Johnson’s childhood and adolescence was dominated by middle-class comfort and privilege. His education was comprehensive and conservative, being directed to producing a predictable product to grace the academic or business establishment of pre-war England. But the system had a cuckoo in the nest. “It is Armistice Day. I and Nevill Johnson (right), Prestatyn, north Wales (1919) A Personal Memoir l Eoin O’Brien 117
my fellows are enjoying the unusual experience of being in the town. We line the main street behind a rope while there pass a succession of decorated floats to the sound of martial music. On one such float sits a shy Britannia, a local girl with helmet, shield and trident of wobbly cardboard. Our little band, dressed in Norfolk jackets and Eton collars wave Union jacks all but me, that is. It seems that at the age of seven I already felt a need to stand aside, to walk against the wind.” Though art was not an influence in young Johnson’s life there were at least two influences that would later become relevant. The “King James bible” springs up in titles of many paintings – how much it was to influence content is debatable, but let us not confuse the enduring influence of this work of art with religiosity. Also from childhood were the pervading evocative influences of sight, sound and smell; indeed Johnson was to ask the same questions that had preoccupied Proust (and would later do so with Beckett): “When you are nosehigh to a dog adults are but trowsers and skirts, so my parents and their friends were quite beyond my horizon. Right now my world was furnished with sunshine and warm stones, with close up grass and shoe-black beetles, and spiders on stilts. It was abundant with blackberries, and mushrooms budded like manna in the morning.” This artistic sense of evocation is further examined in a short passage from Johnson’s autobiography The Other Side of Six in which he attempts to fathom the mind’s remarkable ability to lock away a stimulus of evocation only to release it untarnished many decades later: “Presently I got to my feet and stood like a dog pointing. A certain smell, a perfume, attracted me, striking a deep memory; it was not the clover nor the meadowsweet, nor the camomile and the wild peas. I could not place it and, puzzled, returned to the sweet grass beside Sally trying to trace the memory. Way back I went – to a child of five leaning against the bank of a country lane in Anglesey in 1916. Some grass or flower on that bank released a perfume that profoundly affected me; part sweet, part fusty, like cloverhay or dried honeysuckle. For thirty six years I had remembered this smell with a tang of sensuality and melancholy, and had searched long to match this first rapture (for such it was), and on that August evening as the birds commenced to sing, as we brushed the seeds from our hair and made for the gate, I found it – in a tangle of flowers hanging from laurellike leaves on the wall of the stableyard.” Johnson accepted the marvel of being that permitted the creative process but his thoughts were never too far removed from the scientific basis that facilitates execution of the wonder known as art. “It is said that the brain is a slightly alkaline electro-chemical computer working on glucose at 35 watts. Be that as it may I stand always in awe of the depth and staggering range of man’s memory, astonished by this bulging cornucopia – as I am daily surprised that, without heed or thought I stand upright, or wake in the morning. Thus, within the convolutions of my brain lie the sight and smell of unnumbered mornings, of seals sunning on the rocks and plover on the wind; of streams tumbling turf-brown from the flanks of Errigal; of Muckish glistening and Binyon, the lords and ladies of Donegal and Down.” 118 Nevill Johnson l Paint the Smell of Grass When the time came for Johnson to conform, to become a member of the establishment for which he had been so well-groomed, it was not to be. He tried – but not for long: “One bleak morning I visited a hatter’s shop and emerged in a few moments half shamed, half laughing wearing a bowler hat. Perhaps, thus covered, success would attend me? My father and brother wore them habitually. Let it be understood that I tried; it was just that my skull was the wrong shape for this adornment. I glanced up repeatedly to the driving mirror then pulled impulsively to the curb where I got out to the pavement and removed this expensive item from my head. I placed it upon the ground and crushed it with my foot. In this manner did I commit almamatricide.” Johnson fled to another part of the Empire – to Belfast in 1935, shedding in the process the comfort and security of family and business. “There is a primitive within me, I think, that shies from the trap of comfort and complacency, which looks askance at rare carpets and the second car, which drips a little bile of discontent into our safe havens; a pattern-seeking logic-dodging ghost, refusing sanctuary and the easy option.” So it was to be – the future course had been charted. But Belfast was a strange place in 1934: “Institutional green and pew brown paint on those Presbyterian facades, few signs of style or culture. The trades basic; the making of rope and cloth, the building of ships. And rife here the Calvinist ethic. St Chads and Sedbergh had offered me no key to unlock the secret societies and their unspoken signals of complicity.” Belfast was the beginning of Johnson’s artistic career. Here he joined a circle of writers – Forrest Reid, Louis MacNeice and John Hewitt, and artists – John Luke and George MacCann. Luke influenced Johnson to take up painting for reasons that are not recorded, but what is evident is that once launched Johnson dedicated himself to painting with an intensity that only waned when periods of doubt obsessed him, as happened from time to time. Luke proved a good master and he had in Johnson a willing and talented pupil: “It has not been revealed how this son of a shipyard worker came to be an artist and pupil of the Slade, nor do I recall how I first met this modest man. Suffice to say that he set about to teach me and set me spinning on my courses. For two years we worked together, patient John a good teacher. So, rising before dawn, painting early and late while earning my keep by day I worked without stint, fuelled by the distant hope of one day escaping from business.” The two traveled together to Paris where influences abounded: “We stayed for a time in Paris exploring and tasting rare fruits. Braque and Picasso held sway and the surrealists were on stage; Ernst, Magritte and Tanguy, Lipschitz and Gargallo, splendid straightfaced progenitors of the fur-lined teacup and the spiked flatiron, tripping my pulse. And round the comer fresh young faces – Vivin, Peyronnet, Bombois, children of le Douanier, maître de la réalité. Lifeenhancing stuff it was.” In Belfast Johnson met and married his first wife, Noelle Biehlman, a Frenchwoman from Versailles, and had two sons. The couple escaped the oppressiveness of Belfast to the countryside A Personal Memoir l Eoin O’Brien 119
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AVA GALLERY The Courtyard, Clandebo
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Self Portrait (detail) 2 Nevill Joh
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Acknowledgements THE AUTHORS would
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Kilkeel shipyard (detail) I. The Be
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Page 37 and 38: time, but despite a not dissimilar
Page 39 and 40: artist and a man, all these created
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Page 47 and 48: 1980 saw the publication of Johnson
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Page 63 and 64: 1. I and my wife prepared a picnic
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Page 71 and 72: to pin our claims. Then, if the son
Page 75 and 76: Still Life with Falling Leaves Oil
Page 77 and 78: Figure in a Landscape 1979 Acrylic
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Nevill Johnson: Paint the smell of grass - Eoin O'Brien

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